State of Play Update March 19

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Posted:
We did a stealth production launch this last week, with some of the members on our discord participating. I decided not to publicly announce the launch since there was still a lot of testing to do, and lo-and-behold we found quite a few issues that needed to be addressed.
Splash

Working with AtomicHub

I have been in contact with the AtomicHub team to get our NFT whitelisted on AtomicHub’s site.
In addition, I’m working with their team to determine the best way to use their AtomicAssets API to power the Dark Emblem dApp.

Stability

When we deployed to production, we noticed a lot of stability issues in the UI and the server thanks to our community testing the dApp out. It turns out the production nodes for WAX and for AtomicAssets aren’t as nice to work with as the testnet versions. I released a new version of the app that fixes a lot of these issues.
With the help of the WAX community, I have been looking into ways to add more resiliency to our application. I am using different WAX nodes now to keep our UI and Server in-sync with new blocks on the WAX blockchain. We were running into rate limiting issues with the official WAX API node, but have seen a huge increase in successful requests since changes nodes.
As for the AtomicAsssets API, we are still seeing a lot of 520 responses coming from their API and I am working with them to resolve this issue. Until then, I have updated the dApp to let users retry requests that commonly fail.
If all that wasn’t enough, I added a tool called Bugsnag to the dApp and server so that we can track any errors in the future. This will help us debug the application and take note of which WAX nodes need to be replaced in our code.

Chaos Testing

In order to better prepare the dApp for what can go wrong on production, I created a chaos module that will randomly fail requests when testing with common failures. This will force us to write a better app experience since we will commonly encounter errors on testing versions of the app, instead of just in production.

New Status Page

To help users understand what may be going wrong on the site if features aren’t working correctly, we released a new Status Page at the top of the application.
Health
If an endpoint appears unhealthy, we will show an alert at the top of the page. We use a combination of 3 APIs to create a rich UI: WAX, AtomicAssets, and Dark Emblem. This page will let you monitor their current status.

Looking Forward

There is still more work to do to get the UI to have a seamless experience. We will start looking at proxying requests to our server for AtomicAssets and WAX API calls that we can cache.
More importantly though, I am confident on our fixes and I am moving forward with a full launch of Dark Emblem!